Special Forces soldiers are daring, seasoned troops from America's heartland, selected in a tough competition and trained in an extraordinary range of skills. They know foreign languages and cultures and unconventional warfare better than any U.S. fighters, and while they prefer to stay out of the limelight, veteran war correspondent Linda Robinson gained access to their closed world. She traveled with them on the frontlines, interviewed them at length...

"The rich history of SEAL Team 6 that captured Osama bin Laden stretches back to World War II when US intelligence officials formed a team of special-operation combat swimmers. Under the leadership of Captain Jack Taylor, a California dentist, the Maritime Unit (MU) started training in 1942, learning underwater and covert operation techniques, as it developed an array of James Bond-like new equipment, including the recently invented underwater breathing...

An impossible mission
Behind enemy lines
The never-before-told true story of a small team of American saboteurs with orders to sever the Third Reich's main supply artery — the Brenner Pass
Like a scene from Where Eagles Dare , a small team of American special operatives parachutes into Italy under the noses of thousands of German troops. Their orders: link up with local partisans in the mountains and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner...

"A single company of US paratroopers--calling themselves the "Chosen Few"--arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending...

Two years before the action in Lone Survivor, a team of Green Berets conducted a very different, successful mission in Afghanistan's notorious Pech Valley. Led by Captain Ronald Fry, Hammerhead Six applied the principles of unconventional warfare to "win hearts and minds" and fight against the terrorist insurgency.
In 2003, the Special Forces soldiers entered an area later called "the most dangerous place in Afghanistan." Here, where...

In December of 1943, as Nazi forces sprawled around the world and the future of civilization hung in the balance, a group of highly trained U.S. and Canadian soldiers from humble backgrounds was asked to do the impossible: capture a crucial Nazi stronghold perched atop stunningly steep cliffs. The men were a rough-and-ready group, assembled from towns nested in North America's most unforgiving terrain, where many of them had struggled through the...

In late June 2005, media recounted the tragic story of nineteen U.S. special operations personnel who died at the hands of insurgent/terrorist leader Ahmad Shah, leaving one survivor, deep in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. The harrowing events of Operation Red Wings marked an important, yet widely misreported, chapter in the Global War on Terror. This book reveals the complete story of Operation Red Wings (often mis-referenced as "Operation...

The author takes as his canvas the Vietnam War, as seen through a single mission that occurred on May 2, 1968. A twelve-man Special Forces team had been covertly inserted into a small clearing in the jungle of neutral Cambodia--where U.S. forces were forbidden to operate. The team did not know they had infiltrated a section of jungle that concealed a major enemy base.

"Veteran war correspondent Ann Scott Tyson first met Special Forces Major James Gant and heard about his battle renown when he was awarded the Silver Star several years ago. Soon after, in October, 2009, Gant rocked the US military establishment with his paper "One Tribe at a Time, " an incendiary criticism of what he considered a gaping hole in U.S. strategy: the failure to engage Afghanistan's powerful Pashtun tribes on the eastern border with Pakistan....